The Waste Land
The Waste Land is a poem by T. S. Eliot, widely regarded as one of the most important English-language poems of the 20th century and a central work of modernist poetry. Published in 1922, the 434-line poem first appeared in the United Kingdom in the October issue of Eliot's magazine The Criterion and in the United States in the November issue of The Dial. Among its famous phrases are "April is the cruellest month", "I will show you fear in a handful of dust", and "These fragments I have shored against my ruins".
The Waste Land does not follow a single narrative or feature a consistent style or structure. The poem shifts between voices of satire and prophecy, and features abrupt and unannounced changes of narrator, location, and time, conjuring a vast and dissonant range of cultures and literatures. It employs many allusions to the Western canon: Ovid's Metamorphoses, the legend of the Fisher King, Dante's Divine Comedy, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and even a contemporary popular song, "That Shakespearian Rag".
The poem is divided into five sections. The first, "The Burial of the Dead", introduces the diverse themes of disillusionment and despair. The second, "A Game of Chess", employs alternating narrations in which vignettes of several characters display the fundamental emptiness of their lives. "The Fire Sermon" offers a philosophical meditation in relation to self-denial and sexual dissatisfaction; "Death by Water" is a brief description of a drowned merchant; and "What the Thunder Said" is a culmination of the poem's previously exposited themes explored through a description of a desert journey.
Upon its initial publication The Waste Land received a mixed response, with some critics finding it wilfully obscure while others praised its originality. Subsequent years saw the poem become established as a central work in the modernist canon, and it proved to become one of the most influential works of the century.
History
Background
While at Harvard College Eliot met Emily Hale, the daughter of a minister at Harvard Divinity School, through family friends. He declared his love for her before leaving to live in Europe in 1914, but he did not believe his feelings to be reciprocated. Her influence is felt in The Waste Land, and he would renew his correspondence with her in 1927.Eliot married his first wife Vivienne Haigh-Wood in 1915, having been introduced to her earlier that year by Scofield Thayer. She had a history of mental illness, and it is not clear to what extent Eliot knew about this before the wedding. The marriage had a shaky start: Eliot appears to have had certain neuroses concerning sex and sexuality, perhaps indicated by the women featured in his poetry, and there is speculation that the two were not sexually compatible. In late 1915 Vivienne began to suffer from "nerves" or "acute neuralgia", an illness which undoubtedly bore a mental component. Their friend Bertrand Russell took her to the seaside town of Torquay to recuperate; Eliot took Russell's place after a week, and the couple walked the shore, which Eliot found tranquil. Once back in London, Vivienne was left bored and unoccupied while Eliot worked fourteen or fifteen hours a day, and in 1918 had a brief affair with Russell; it is not known if Eliot was aware of this. Eliot himself, under strain from his heavy workload, concern about his father's health, and the stress of the ongoing war, was also suffering from poor health, to the extent that his doctor had ordered him not to write prose for six months. In the succeeding years both experienced periods of depression, with Eliot being constantly exhausted and Vivienne experiencing migraines. In 1921 Eliot was diagnosed with a nervous disorder and prescribed three months of rest, a period that precipitated the writing of The Waste Land.
Eliot had worked as a schoolteacher from 1915 to 1916, resigning to make a living from lecturing and literary reviews. He was obliged, however, to take a job at Lloyds Bank in March 1917, earning a salary of £270 in 1918 for a role interpreting the balance sheets of foreign banks. He would work at the bank for the next nine years. He began to work as an assistant editor of literary magazine The Egoist on the side, his salary of £9 per quarter partly financed by John Quinn, Ezra Pound's patron. Eliot also began to write on a freelance basis for The Athenaeum and The Times Literary Supplement in 1919, which built his reputation as a respected critic and journalist.
While living in London Eliot became acquainted with literary figures, most notably Pound in 1914, who would help publish Eliot's work and edit The Waste Land. Eliot also met Aldous Huxley and Katherine Mansfield, as well as members of the Bloomsbury Group, in London in 1916, although he did not meet Leonard and Virginia Woolf until two years later.
Eliot's first collection, Prufrock and Other Observations, was published in 1917 thanks to the efforts of Pound. Publishers were not confident in its success, and it was published by Harriet Shaw Weaver of The Egoist only with funding provided by Pound's wife Dorothy, although Eliot was unaware of this arrangement. It generated very little interest until after the publication of The Waste Land, and did not sell its initial run of 500 copies until 1922. Poems was published in 1919 by the Woolfs' Hogarth Press, again having been turned down by several other publishers. By 1920 Eliot had established himself as a reputed critic, and the publication of Ara Vos Prec and the US publication of Poems generated notable press coverage. His 1920 collection of essays, The Sacred Wood, met with mixed reviews, and Eliot felt it should have been revised further.
Writing
Eliot probably worked on the text that became The Waste Land for several years preceding its first publication in 1922. In 1919 he referred to "a long poem I have had on my mind for a long time" in a letter to his mother. In a May 1921 letter to New York lawyer and art patron John Quinn, Eliot wrote that he had "a long poem in mind and partly on paper which I am wishful to finish".File:Tseliotplaque.jpg|thumb|upright|The blue plaque near the Nayland Rock shelter in Margate where Eliot wrote some of The Waste Land.
Richard Aldington, in his memoirs, relates that "a year or so" before Eliot read him the manuscript draft of The Waste Land in London, Eliot visited him in the country. While walking through a graveyard, they discussed Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. Aldington writes: "I was surprised to find that Eliot admired something so popular, and then went on to say that if a contemporary poet, conscious of his limitations as Gray evidently was, would concentrate all his gifts on one such poem he might achieve a similar success."
In the autumn of 1921 Eliot and Vivienne travelled to the coastal resort of Margate. Eliot had been recommended rest following a diagnosis of some form of nervous disorder, and had been granted three months' leave from the bank where he was employed, so the trip was intended as a period of convalescence. Eliot worked on what would become The Waste Land while sitting in the Nayland Rock shelter on Margate Sands, producing "some 50 lines", and the area is referenced directly in "The Fire Sermon" The couple travelled to Paris in November, where Eliot showed an early version of the poem to Pound. Pound had become acquainted with Eliot seven years previously, and had helped get some of Eliot's previous work published. Eliot was travelling on to Lausanne for treatment by Dr Roger Vittoz, who had been recommended to him by Ottoline Morrell; Vivienne was to stay at a sanatorium just outside Paris. While under Vittoz's care, Eliot completed the first draft of The Waste Land.
Editing
Eliot returned from Switzerland to Paris in early January 1922 with the 19-page draft version of the poem; his treatment with Dr Vittoz proved to have been very successful, at least in the short term. Eliot and Pound proceeded to edit the poem further, continuing after Eliot returned to London. The editing process removed a large amount of content. Eliot allowed Pound a high degree of control over the shape and contents of the final version, deferring to his judgement on matters such as using Eliot's previous poem "Gerontion" as a prelude, or using an excerpt from the death of Kurtz in Conrad's Heart of Darkness as the epigraph. Biographer Peter Ackroyd considers Pound's focus to have been on "the underlying rhythm of the poem... Pound heard the music, and cut away what was for him the extraneous material which was attached to it." By removing much of Eliot's material, Pound allowed for readers to more freely interpret it as a less structured and didactic work, and his edits are generally considered to have been beneficial.Vivienne also reviewed drafts of The Waste Land. The section "A Game of Chess" partly depicts scenes from the Eliots' marriage, although at her request a specific line was removed "The ivory men make company between us" perhaps because she found the depiction of their unhappy marriage too painful. In 1960, thirteen years after Vivienne's death, Eliot inserted the line from memory into a fair copy made for sale to aid the London Library.
In a late December 1921 letter to Eliot to celebrate the "birth" of the poem, Pound wrote a bawdy poem of 48 lines entitled "Sage Homme" in which he identified Eliot as the mother of the poem but compared himself to the midwife. The first lines are:
Publication
Negotiations over the publication of The Waste Land started in January 1922 and lasted until the late summer. Horace Liveright, of the New York publishing firm of Boni & Liveright, had a number of meetings with Pound while in Paris, and at a dinner on 3 January 1922, with Pound, Eliot and James Joyce, he made offers for The Waste Land, Ulysses, and works by Pound. Eliot was to receive a royalty of 15% for a book version of the poem planned for autumn publication, although Liveright was concerned that the work was too short. Eliot was still under contract with his previous publisher Alfred Knopf, which gave Knopf the rights to Eliot's next two books, but in April Eliot managed to secure a release from that agreement.Eliot also sought a deal with magazines. He had become friends with Scofield Thayer, editor of literary magazine The Dial, while at Milton Academy and Harvard College, and Eliot had offered the poem to Thayer for publication shortly after returning from Lausanne in January. Even though The Dial offered $150 for the poem, 25% more than its standard rate, Eliot was offended that a year's work would be valued so low, especially since he knew that George Moore had been paid £100 for a short story. The deal with The Dial almost fell through, but with Quinn's efforts eventually an agreement was reached where, in addition to the $150, Eliot would be awarded The Dials second annual prize for outstanding service to letters, which carried an award of $2,000.
In New York, in late summer, Boni & Liveright made an agreement with The Dial allowing the magazine to be the first to publish the poem in the US, on the condition that they purchase 350 copies of the book at discount. Eliot suggested that the "possibility of the book's getting the prize" might allow Boni & Liveright to use the publicity increase their initial sales.
The poem was first published in the UK in the first issue of Eliot's magazine The Criterion and in the US in the November issue of The Dial. Eliot had initially suggested spreading the poem over four issues of The Dial, having doubts about its coherence as a single piece, and had considered publishing it across two issues of The Criterion in order to improve sales, but Pound objected. In December the Boni & Liveright book edition was published in the US, with an initial run of 1,000 copies and, very soon afterwards, a second edition, also of 1,000 copies. The first book edition was the first publication to print Eliot's accompanying notes, which he had added to pad the piece out and thereby address Liveright's concerns about its length. In September 1923, the Hogarth Press, a private press run by Eliot's friends Leonard and Virginia Woolf, published the first UK book edition of The Waste Land in a run of approximately 460 copies. Eliot, whose 1922 annual salary at Lloyds Bank was £500, made approximately £630 with The Dial, Boni & Liveright, and Hogarth Press publications.
Eliot sent the original manuscript drafts of the poem as a gift to John Quinn, believing it to be worthwhile to preserve the effects of Pound's editing; they arrived in New York in January 1923. Upon Quinn's death in 1924 they were inherited by his sister Julia Anderson, and for many years they were believed lost. In the early 1950s Mrs Anderson's daughter Mary Conroy found the documents in storage. In 1958 she sold them privately to the New York Public Library. It was not until April 1968, three years after Eliot's death, that the existence and whereabouts of the manuscript drafts were made known to Valerie Eliot, his second wife. In 1971 a facsimile of the original drafts was published, containing Pound's annotations, edited and annotated by Valerie Eliot.